Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (21 page)
Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
PETER SÍS
I was born in Czechoslovakia, a country where the door was always closed. You could not go outside, you could just dream about it. Then someone opened the door just a little
bit and we could see the ocean and the rainbows. But then the door closed again.
So I was sad, trying to remember what it was
that I had seen. I might have even cried. And that was just when I discovered Jacques Prévert’s ‘Le Message’.
For me it was about the freedom of walking through the door. It was the 1970s and a young man in my country burned himself to death because he believed it.
The Message
The door that someone opened
The door that someone closed
The chair on which
someone sat
The cat that someone petted
The fruit that someone bit into
The letter that someone read
The chair that someone tipped over
The door that someone opened
The road that someone ran down
The woods that someone crossed
The river in which someone jumped
The hospital where someone died.
(c. 1950)
TRANSLATION
BY TERRY LAJTHA
Born in Brno, Moravia, in 1949, Peter Sís today lives and works in New York as an artist, author and filmmaker. A 2003 MacArthur Fellow, he has created award-winning
animated shorts and films, tapestries, stage designs and murals. He has written and illustrated numerous books for adults and children, including
Komodo!
(1993),
Starry
Messenger: Galileo
Galilei
(1996),
Tibet Through the Red Box
(1998),
The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin
(2003) and
The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain
(2007)
.
He received the
Hans Christian Andersen Award for his body of work in 2012.
DYLAN THOMAS
(1914–53)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
I don’t really have a connection to this poem. Thomas wrote it while his father was dying, but I didn’t know my father was dying while it was happening, and when I
heard that he had died my reaction was minimal. I was actually in my thirties when I discovered this poem,
and it touched me on two levels. First, it is a brilliant example of a villanelle, a very
difficult poetic form. Dylan Thomas packs so much emotion into it, and not a word is wasted.
But it is not the form that moves me to tears: it’s the love I can feel that he has for his father, the desperation in his ‘voice’ as he is willing his father to live. He is
grabbing his father with his words
and shaking him, pleading with him not to fade, but to rage. I haven’t talked to a therapist about this, but there might also be something here about his
having the kind of love for his father that I never had for mine.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage
against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(1951)
The writer, dub poet and musician Benjamin Zephaniah (b. 1958) has published four novels, five children’s books and seven plays, as well as fourteen volumes of verse,
notably
The Dread
Affair: Collected Poems
(1985),
Rasta Time in Palestine
(1990) and
Too Black, Too Strong
(2001). His discography includes four singles and six albums,
including the first recording made by the Wailers following the death of Bob Marley.
PHILIP LARKIN
(1922–85)
FRANK KERMODE
Frank Kermode’s role in the genesis of this book is detailed in its preface. Although himself the victim of a backhanded public compliment from Larkin –
If I could talk, I’d be a worthless prof,
Every other year off,
Just a jetset egghead, TLS toff,
Not old
toad: Frank Kermode.
– he remained an ardent admirer, describing Larkin in
An Appetite for Poetry
(1989) as ‘a poet of extraordinary powers’, lamenting that Larkin was
‘so echt English that Americans tend to find him dull and insular’. Kermode asked for this poem to be read at his funeral.
Unfinished Poem
I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof
And lay on the bed there with my jacket off.
Seeds of light were sown on the failure of evening.
The dew came down. I lay in the quiet, smoking.
That was a way to live – newspaper for sheets,
A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts
From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!
That was a place to go, that emaciate
attic!
For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind,
Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;
To keep out of his thoughts was my whole care,
Yet down among sunlit courts, yes, he was there,
Taking his rents; yes, I had only to look
To see the shape of his head and the shine of his book,
And the creep
of the world under his sparrow-trap sky,
To know how little slips his immortal memory.
So it was stale time then, day in, day out,
Blue fug in the room, nothing to do but wait
The start of his feet on the stair, that sad sound
Climbing to cut me from his restless mind
With a sign that the air should stick in my nose like bread,
The light swell up and turn black – so I shammed dead,
Still as a stuck pig, hoping he’d keep concerned
With boys who were making the fig when his back was turned;
And the sun and the stove and the mice and the gnawed paper
Made up the days and nights when I missed supper,
Paring my nails, looking over the farbelow street
Of tramways
and bells. But one night I heard the feet.
Step after step they mounted with confidence.
Time shrank. They paused at the top. There was no defence.
I sprawled to my knees. Now they came straight at my door.
This, then, the famous eclipse? The crack in the floor
Widening for one long plunge? In a sharp trice,
The world, lifted
and wrung, dripped with remorse.
The fact of breathing tightened into a shroud.
Light cringed. The door swung inwards. Over the threshold
Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,
Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised.
Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?
Why is he not here? What summer have you broken
from?
(1951)
Sir Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was regarded as the foremost literary critic of his generation, the author of such books as
Romantic Image
(1957),
The Sense of an
Ending
(1967) and
Shakespeare’s Language
(2000). He was Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London, and the King Edward VII Professor
of
English Literature at Cambridge University. He also inspired the founding of the
London Review of Books
in 1979.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
(1911–79)